Hi,

I wanted to know who is the original founder of these website and who is the current owner of them.

• Shutterstock ☰    John Oringer

• iStock  ☰    Bruce Livingstone and co-founder Patrick Lor, later acquired by Getty Images at $50 Million

• Dreamstime  ☰   Serban Enache

• Fotolia  ☰    Thibaud Elziere, Oleg Tscheltzoff and Patrick Chassany, later acquired by Adobe in December 11, 2014

• 123RF  ☰     Andy Sitt

• Depositphotos  ☰

• Pond5  ☰

• Bigstockphoto  ☰    Dawn & Tim Donahue

• Canstockphoto  ☰    Duncan Enman

• Alamy  ☰    James West (in 1999), along with his uncle Mike Fischer

• Getty Images  ☰    Mark Getty and Jonathan Klein, later acquired by private equity firm Hellman & Friedman(H&F) in 2008 and then sold to Carlyle Group in 2012 at ~$3.5 billion

• Envato  ☰    Collis Ta'eed, Cyan Ta'eed, and Jun Rung

• Canva  ☰   

• Stockfresh  ☰   Peter Hamza and Andras Pfaff

• Vectorstock ☰   

• Crestock  ☰    Geir Are Jensen

• Panthermedia  ☰   

• ColourBox  ☰   

• 500px ☰   

• ClipArtof  ☰     

• StockXpert  ☰    Peter Hamza and Andras Pfaff, later acquired by Getty Images in 2009

• Corbis  ☰   

This is for general inquiry. Let me know more by filling telling here in comments and I will update the list.

Getty and Klein were just two opportunistic bankers.  They bought Tony Stone Images and re-branded the business as Getty Images.

StockXpert and StockFresh came from the same team:

http://www.microstockdiaries.com/stockfresh.html

Andy Sitt is the president of Inmagine, 123rf's parent company, and founder

https://www.linkedin.com/pub/andy-sitt/24/60a/7b2

You can find envato info here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Envato

Patrick Lor was a co-founder of iStock

You can probably find more with searches...

Quote from: Rose Tinted Glasses on September 02, 2015, 10:54

Quote from: Digital66 on September 02, 2015, 09:24

Getty and Klein were just two opportunistic bankers.  They bought Tony Stone Images and re-branded the business as Getty Images.

How I miss submitting directly to Tony Stone Images before it was bought out by Getty Images. Those were seriously some great money making days. I do recall though that Tony Stone Images was just one of many acquisitions at the time in the whole branding of Getty Images. The good old days though, real images, real talent, real editors, real people.

There were many acquisitions indeed, but it was Tony Stone who started them.  He had already acquired companies like Click, After-Image, etc.  Getty and Klein saw the great potential of this business, bought Tony Stone Images and continued the acquisitions Tony had started.

I do have very fond memories of Tony Stone Images. Absolutely great place to have your work and some very good talent - it was an agency that one could be very proud to have been accepted and a part of. I had been with them for several years then Getty bought them out.

updated **

Thanks for letting the list update, let me know more or if you have any website which I have missed, I will update it.